Portland Museum of Art launches competition to select architect for expansion — Portland Museum of Art

The Portland Museum of Art has released an international layout competitiveness to choose an architectural firm to oversee a main expansion of its downtown campus.

The museum introduced options in February to start elevating $85 million towards the venture, which is most likely to include things like building of a 6- or 7-tale, 60,000-square-foot developing on the web page of the previous Children’s Museum & Theatre of Maine, as perfectly as some renovations to current properties.

“We are energized to invite authorities from around the entire world to internalize the ambitions of the PMA Blueprint and transform them into actual physical spaces that provide them to existence,” museum director Mark Bessire stated in a assertion. “This is no uncomplicated process, as our communities have produced their expectations distinct for open and modern areas that allow a versatile assortment of programs, exhibitions, and artwork.”

The project’s completion is however 4 decades away, but Wednesday’s announcement is a main step. The museum is doing work with a New York consulting agency, Dovetail Style and design Strategists, to pick an architect. Providers have until eventually July 1 to post interest. From there, the museum will pick up to 4 firms to establish a strategy style for the job, which will be because of in November and will be exhibited publicly. A profitable group will be chosen in December.

Museum officials and board associates have envisioned a making that, in addition to a lot more than doubling the exhibition space, would be promptly recognizable on the Portland skyline, with a rooftop cafe and sculpture park.

“The exclusive level of competition we have intended lets for the electricity of architecture and the prospective of strategies to collide, building a platform that will captivate the extremely greatest, numerous experts and will in the long run convert the PMA’s eyesight into a constructed fact,” Dovetail Design and style Strategists President Susanna Sirefman stated in a statement.

The museum has been scheduling for an enlargement for numerous a long time, but all those plans accelerated with the 2018 acquire of the creating at 142 Free St., which previously housed the Children’s Museum.

The new developing would be designed on that website and would include a floor floor with free of charge art galleries, school rooms and neighborhood place, and room on the remaining flooring for an auditorium, touring exhibitions, places of work, an all-ages “makers space” and a photography center.

The museum’s campus also includes four other properties: the McLellan Household, the Sweat Memorial Galleries, the Clapp Residence and the Payson Building, whose signature arches confront the intersection of Congress and High streets.

Museum officials undertaking the addition will permit Portland to accommodate involving 300,000 and 500,000 people just about every yr to view a selection that incorporates impressionist masters like Monet and Renoir, Maine icons Winslow Homer and Andrew Wyeth, among the some others, and a lot more modern day names like mixed-media artist David Driskell and photographer Nan Goldin.

The undertaking also coincides with an ongoing overhaul of Congress Sq., a person of the city’s busiest parts, that incorporates a redesign of the intersection and of the park that sits directly across from the museum.